September 2009

“I can change only myself, but sometimes that is enough.” – Ruth Humlecker

As I explained last week, I am reprinting the text of my latest free Create Prosperity Now tele-class about integrity so that if you missed the call, you won’t miss this absolutely essential prerequisite to your ability to manifest your desires.

Here are the four major aspects of Integrity that, in my experience, have the biggest impact on our ability to live a life of freedom and ease, where we effortlessly attract the people, ideas and resources to us that help fulfill our Intentions with ease and grace:

1) You must keep your word to others (be consistent and count-on-able).

2) You must keep your word to yourself (be valuable to yourself).

3) You must complete any incompletions in your life.

4) You must clean up any messes you make as quickly as possible.

Last week, I reprinted the first two steps that we covered in my August 27th tele-class. Here is Part II, covering the final two steps you must take to create the foundation for living a life of integrity and abundance:

3) You must complete any incompletions in your life. In Coach U, where I took my Life Coach training, they call these “tolerations” – things you are tolerating, putting up with, that don’t serve you and cause a level of chronic annoyance and guilt. Like a dishonored promise, an incompletion clutters up your “clearing closet” and interferes with creating new Intentions. Something NEW can’t show up for you when your space for receiving it is full of unfinished business.

Incompletions are often of your own making, but even if you didn’t cause the original situation, if you don’t get it resolved, it will keep you from manifesting what you want in your own life. Incompletions can be big or little projects you haven’t finished, such as cleaning out the garage or finishing a low-priority work project that’s been in your in-basket forever.

But there can also be incompletions in relationships with people in your current life or in your past. A relationship incompletion might be that you know you were not 100% authentic in expressing your opinion with someone who asked for it, or you are still holding a grudge with someone, or you feel chronically disempowered around someone because you didn’t say what you needed to say about what they did to you or what you did to them.

Who do you need to apologize to? Who do you need to stand up for yourself with? Who do you simply need to say, “It’s over” to?

When you don’t say what you need to say to be complete with someone else, you are sending the message to the Universe that “I don’t matter.” And if you don’t believe in your own value, since energy attracts like energy,according to theLaw of Attraction, then you can count on attracting people and situations that will constantly send you the message that you aren’t valuable to them, either. Getting complete with another person can be one of the most liberating things you can possibly do for yourself – and it will have a huge impact on your power to manifest what you want for yourself and your life.

4) The final Integrity issue you must master is to be able to clean up any “messes” you make as quickly and efficiently as possible. A mess is something you did or failed to do that had a negative impact on someone else. This is a tough one for a lot of people because it’s human nature for us to not want to admit when we have made a mistake.

But this isn’t about making yourself “bad and wrong” for doing or not doing something. It’s about restoring your integrity whenever you realize that you have slipped out of integrity. It should not cause you to feel guilt or shame to admit making a mistake. Instead, it is liberating, because in restoring your integrity, you restore your BELIEF in yourself and others’ BELIEF in you, too. It re-establishes your value in your OWN eyes, which is the most important thing.

Cleaning up your integrity is a remarkably simple and straightforward four –step process. Here’s all you need to do to clean up a mess you’ve made:

Step One: Take 100% responsibility for what you did. Simply state the facts as clearly and succinctly as you can, with no excuses, no poor-me story, no “buts.”

Step Two: Sincerely apologize for the impact you believe your action had on the other person. This demonstrates your understanding of and empathy for the inconvenience or hurt that you caused them.

Step Three: State what they can count on you for in the future – and make sure you INTEND to be count-on-able for that. If you let someone down once and clean it up, they will almost always forgive you. But if you promise a different behavior and then don’t follow through, they will not let it go twice. So promise a higher standard and HOLD YOURSELF to it.

Step Four: Ask the other person what they need to say TO you or need FROM you in order to be complete with the issue.

Here’s an example of what this would look like if you arrived 35 minutes late for lunch with your girl friend because you got caught up on an important phone call at the office. To make matters worse, in your rush out the door, you left your cell phone behind, so you couldn’t even call the restaurant to leave her a message. By the time you arrived, your friend had been frantically trying to call you, and was scared that something terrible must have happened to you.

You say, “Susie, I apologize for being 35 minutes late. I didn’t leave on time to get here and I forgot my cell phone so I couldn’t call you and you couldn’t reach me. I am SO sorry to have left you alone, waiting here and worrying about me because of my carelessness. What you can count on me for in the future is to be on time for our appointments and to be reachable if something out of the ordinary happens. Do you accept my apology?”

Susie replies: “ Well, of course I do! I know you didn’t mean to make me worry, but I just don’t want to ever have to go through that again!

You say: You won’t have to, I promise. Is there anything else you need from me for you to feel complete about this?

Susie says: No, we’re good. What did you do to your hair? It looks great!

Then you go on with your lunch, knowing you restored your integrity by taking 100% responsibility, and your friend feels understood and complete with you.

You should note these steps, because I promise you that you WILL have messes to clean up for the rest of your life, just like I will. Integrity is never “handled.” It’s never “fixed” and good-to-go forever. If you think it is, you will get complacent and that is when you can REALLY create some messes!

Despite our best intentions, we all inevitably will still slip up from time to time. But if you simply take complete responsibility for what you did, without exhibiting or feeling guilt, shame or defensiveness or blaming others for it, 99 times out 100, people will FORGIVE you. In fact, it is such a breath of fresh air to deal with someone who doesn’t play the “blame game,” it is likely that they will think even MORE of you for having handled yourself with such dignity in restoring your integrity.

One of my clients got a wonderful example of this when she called her credit card company to clean up a mess she’d made. She had forgotten to pay a bill one month and when the next bill rolled around, she discovered that the company had doubled her interest rate, as they were allowed to do after just one slip-up. She panicked, knowing that rate was something she could not pay, and she just stopped sending payments or communicating with them.

After our next coaching session, at my urging, she called her credit card company’s customer service and told them exactly what happened, with no excuses. She simply said, “I messed up. This is my fault. Now, what do I need to do to fix it?” The customer service rep was very understanding and grateful that my client had called. After looking up her account in the computer, the rep came back on the line and said, “I discovered that you actually qualify for a lower interest rate than you were paying. I’m changing you to the lower rate right now.” Not only did my client restore her integrity, she came out AHEAD financially for having done so.

PARTICIPATION EXERCISE

Now, to help you lock in the learning, and begin your own personal practice of completing your incompletions and restoring your integrity, so you have a clear space to manifest your Intentions into, I invite you to create this little practice of getting complete with something or someone in your life that has been a nagging source of irritation for awhile. There are three steps:

1) First, write down something specific that you really WANT to manifest in your life in the next 30 days — something you don’t know HOW to manifest right now, but you believe it would be POSSIBLE to have it manifest in 30 days.

2) Next, write down ONE incompletion that you would be willing to complete within the next month, if you simply believed that restoring your integrity in this area would create a clearing for manifesting the thing you want to have within the same month. The incompletion item and your manifestation goal don’t have to be directly related at all. You just need allow yourself to BELIEVE that by simply completing the incompletion, you will be giving the Universe the space it is waiting for to send you the “How” for manifesting your desire.

The item you choose to complete should be something substantial, such as finishing a household or work project that has been hanging over you for awhile, making a difficult phone call or writing a difficult email you would really rather avoid, or initiating a conversation with someone you need to get complete with. Make it something you are sure you can complete within one month, however.

3) Step three is to specify just ONE specific STEP that you are willing to commit to actually DO within the next 7 days to start you on the completion project, so you won’t let your good intentions die on the vine.

For example, you might want to manifest a new job within the next month.

If your completion project is cleaning out your garage, for your first step you might commit to purchasing some cardboard boxes within the next 7 days for packing up the miscellaneous junk in the garage. Or for your first step, you might commit to calling up a few of your friends within the next week and inviting them to come to a clean-up-the-garage party two Saturdays from now.

When you complete your incompletion project within the next month, it will have an amazing impact on your life that you can’t even now imagine. I promise you that you will feel SO much more freedom and ease, it will have a direct positive effect on your being able to MANIFEST the thing you want to have in your life in 30 days or less!____________________________________________________________________

If you have missed any of this year’s series of F.R.E.E. monthly Create Prosperity Now Tele-classes, all the audios are still available for download to listen to at your convenience. These 60-minute live classes, which teach you exactly how to put the Law of Attraction into ACTION in your life, are held the last Wednesday of each month at 6pm Pacific. I hope you’ll join us on September 30 to learn “The Secret to Happiness.” Please email me at caroll@practicalprosperitycoach.com to receive future call invitations and replay links.

“Until you accept total responsibility – no matter what – you will not be able to put plans in place to accomplish your goals.” – David Cottrell

As you know, I rarely reprint the text of my free monthly Create Prosperity Now tele-class calls. In fact, I’ve only done it once before. But INTEGRITY is so absolutely essential (and so often misunderstood) a prerequisite to your ability to manifest your desires, that I want to make sure ALL my readers receive this message, even if they didn’t have time to join me on the monthly call. Here is Part I of the text from my August 27 tele-class:

OK, we’re now ready for today’s topic, “Integrity Fuels Intention.” Your first question might be, “What does INTEGRITY have to do with manifesting my Intention using the Law of Attraction?” Well, the answer, as I hope to demonstrate to you, is that it has EVERYTHING to do with it.

If you are “out of integrity” in any area of your life, you don’t have a clean, clear space to create what you want in. Let’s call it a “clearing.”

This is a big topic, so I’d like to start with defining exactly what I mean by “Integrity.” The dictionary defines Integrity as: 1) Possession of firm principles 2) Completeness and 3) Wholeness.

But the sense in which I am using the word Integrity with you now, while it touches on all of these, encompasses much more than just these three aspects. Here is a definition of Integrity that was created by Landmark Education, a respected personal development organization that has been a leader in the human potential movement since the 1980’s. Theirs is about the most comprehensive and PRACTICAL definition of Integrity I’ve ever heard:

“Integrity is nothing hidden, being truthful and honest, doing complete work, working from an empowering context, and doing very well what you do, doing it as it was meant to be done or better, and without cutting corners. In other words, honoring one’s word (doing what you know to do, doing what you said you would do and on time, doing what others could expect you to do even if you haven’t said that you would do it, and saying when you are not doing this as soon as you realize you won’t be doing it or won’t be doing it on time.)” – Courtesy of Landmark Education

I’d like to cover with you now the four key elements of Integrity that I have seen play a direct role in what has manifested in my life and the lives of the more than 150 clients I’ve had the privilege to help reach their dreams using the Law of Attraction.

When you don’t have all four of these elements of Integrity in place in your life, it is impossible to attract what you want — because there is simply too much “clutter” filling up your “clearing,” which is the energetic, spiritual and mental space that the Universe uses to deliver the “How” to you.

It is much like having your closet crammed full of an old, outdated, wrong-size wardrobe, so that you don’t have any space to hang up all the NEW clothes you are longing to buy. You simply won’t go shopping for a new wardrobe – or create new Intentions — when you know that there is no place to put them when they show up because your “clearing” closet is jammed full of all the incompletions and out-of-integrities that are cluttering up your life.

And these incompletions and out-of-integrity habits not only prevent you from creating all the NEW things you long to have, but even worse, they stress you out, sap your energy and burden you with a feeling of “guilt” that makes you miserable instead of joyous and free.

Here are the four major aspects of Integrity that, in my experience, have the biggest impact on our ability to live a life of freedom and ease, where we effortlessly attract the people, ideas and resources to us that help fulfill our Intentions with ease and grace:

1) You must keep your word to others (be consistent and count-on-able).

2) You must keep your word to yourself (be valuable to yourself)

3) You must complete any incompletions in your life.

4) You must clean up any messes you make as quickly as possible.

Let’s examine them one at a time:

1) First, you must keep your word to others

When someone chronically fails to keep their promises to others, they become known as NOT count-on-able — otherwise known as “flaky.” Don’t you know at least one person in your life that — much as you love them –you know deep down that if you really, REALLY needed to have someone show up for you at a specific time and place to do a specific task or there would be serious consequences for you — you would NOT call on them? Of course you do!

That’s because, over time, that person has proven to be untrustworthy– to you and probably to everyone in their life. They are chronically late, or they forget appointments, or they change their mind and don’t tell you until the last minute, ruining your plans. (Don’t we all have someone we just know is going to be at least two hours late for Thanksgiving dinner every year, so we have learned to lie to them that it’s 2 hours EARLIER than it really is?)

Worse yet, maybe you realize that YOU are one of these people. Maybe you know in your heart of hearts that your friends or relatives would not call on you if they really needed someone to come through for them — because they know it’s a crapshoot whether you will show up on time, ready to do whatever needs to be done or not. Trust me, you do NOT want to be one of these people.

Think about someone you know who doesn’t keep their word to others. What is their life like? Are they living the life of their dreams? Are they envied as someone who seems to be naturally lucky, who catches all the breaks? Or do they live in a chronic state of drama, chaos and guilt, forever having to come up with lame excuses for their behavior and knowing that they are infamous for NOT being trustworthy?

Now, think of someone you know who is famous for being “count-on-able” and consistent — someone whose word is gold. If they make you a promise, you know that you can take it to the bank. What is their life like? Chances are, they are living a life of freedom and ease. They seem to be able to do ten things at once and not break a sweat, and whenever they really set their mind to creating something they want, they always seem to get it.

That is not a coincidence! When you are a man or woman of your word, you have created a natural “clearing” in your life for attracting what you want and need. You always have a clear, clean space in which to manifest a new desire – instead of a cluttered “clearing closet” full of chaos, guilt and broken promises.

2) Even more importantly, you must keep your word to YOURSELF.

This is harder for most of us to do. Don’t you usually do more for others than you do for yourself? Don’t you hold yourself to a higher standard in your dealings with others than you use for measuring your actions on your OWN behalf? I know it was true for me until just a few years ago.

I was one of those “take it to the bank” people when it came to promises I made to OTHERS. I was never, ever late for an appointment and I always did what I promised to do for someone else, come hell or high water. But when it came to keeping my promises to MYSELF, I regularly broke my word. I went off my diet, didn’t go to the gym, didn’t go to bed on time so I could be rested, didn’t take the weekend off for much-needed rejuvenation, but instead worked at my desk 6 and ½ days a week for months and months in a row, always telling myself I needed to finish just a little more paper work for my clients and my colleagues so I wouldn’t “let them down.”

Thank goodness, I eventually came to see this pattern for what it was – an insidious way of defining myself as less valuable than others. That’s what it really means when you break your word to yourself. You are sending the Universe the message, “I don’t matter. Don’t worry about me. I really don’t deserve to have what I want because I’m not really valuable.” Just like the “cluttered clearing” you create when you break your word to others, when you don’t keep your word to yourself, you create an energetic logjam that prevents the Universe from sending you the means for manifesting your desire.

There’s another aspect to this, as well, which is that when you consistently don’t carry through on your promises to yourself, you begin to lose FAITH in yourself. Faith, which is another word for BELIEF, is essential in the manifestation process. It erodes your belief that your dreams ARE possible to fulfill, when you don’t even believe it’s possible for you to stick to your own diet and exercise schedule!

In order to have a rock-solid belief in the possibility of manifesting my dreams, I realized that I must first have a rock-solid belief in myself. Being count-able to myself was essential in creating this self-belief.

That’s when I made new promises to myself that I knew I actually intended to keep — not pie-in the-sky hopes that I’d go to the gym five days a week and eat only salads and take every weekend to play –but true PROMISES I knew I could and would live up to. And then – and this is essential – I created a workable accountability structure to support me in keeping my promises to myself. I did that by telling my friends my intentions and asked them to help me to be accountable for keeping them.

For over a year, my best girlfriends and I have checked in by email every Monday morning to report our accomplishments: how many days we walked for exercise, how we did on our food plans and what we did to be good to ourselves and demonstrate our value the week before. We give each other “Atta-girls” in return that add to the pleasure of carrying through on our promises. I have found that having an “accountability partner” is critical for keeping self-promises. This is a big part of why my clients hire me as their coach – to help them stay on track for carrying out their promised actions so they can reach their goals. I’m no different – the best coaches have their own coaches, or at least a committed friend who won’t let them off the hook!

Please join me next week for the final two steps necessary for you to take to create a life of Integrity. I will also share a simple but very powerful exercise that can help you to actually manifest something BIG that you want in the next 30 days!

If you have missed any of this year’s series of F.R.E.E. monthly Create Prosperity Now Tele-classes, all the audios are still available for download to listen to at your convenience. These 60-minute live classes, which teach you exactly how to put the Law of Attraction into ACTION in your life, are held the last Wednesday of each month at 6pm Pacific. I hope you’ll join us on Wednesday, September 30 to learn “The Secret to Happiness.”Please email me at caroll@practicalprosperitycoach.com to receive future call invitations and replay links.

The closer your actual living now comes to your hoped-for living in the future, the more likely you are to grow into your vision. – Victoria Moran

Well, it’s Labor Day weekend, which means the unofficial end of summer is here! My favorite season has gone by quickly, but this year I am proud to say that have I truly savored every minute of it, as I hope you have.

Part of what made this possible was the brainstorm I had early in the season to emulate Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show from my childhood and have a “guest writer” (like he had a “guest host”) stand in for me on the blog a few times a month so I could have more time for fun and play this summer. It worked! I feel rested and refreshed and ready for a busy fall of Practical Prosperity Coaching! And you, I hope, have enjoyed the wonderful tips for abundant living that these great writers have provided.

To close out the summer, I’ve again selected a chapter from Victoria Moran’s lovely little book, Creating a Charmed Life. As you know, a skill you definitely must use if you want to become a Master Manifester is vividly visualizing yourself gratefully enjoying the thing you want to manifest, even before it has appeared in the material world.

Victoria Moran has taken this a BIG step further. She advocates that if you actually begin living NOW the way you dream of living someday, it will make your dreams manifest faster. I hope you make the effort to put some of her suggestions into practice because not only will they accelerate your ability to manifest your heart’s desires, but they are lots of fun too!

Chapter 34: Study Method Acting

from Creating a Charmed Life by Victoria Moran

You don’t need theatrical aspirations to benefit from this acting method: the method of acting as if you already lived a charmed life. This is the fine art of faking it. It’s not dishonest because you’re not operating outside the truth, only outside the purview of present fact. Facts are malleable; they change all the time. You can help change them for the better.

First, think about what you want to do. What are your heart’s desires? How would you like to improve your life? Now, imagine that it has already happened. Put yourself in that picture. If you were living in every way the life you want to live, what would you be wearing? What would you have eaten for breakfast this morning? What dishes would you have used? What would you be doing with this day? What would go on your to-do list?

As you answer these questions, consider the number of matchups you have between your existing life and your life in that idyllic, imagined tomorrow. The closer your actual living now comes to your hoped-for living in the future, the more likely you are to grow into your vision. Rehearse!

Get into costume. Start rehearsing for the life you want by looking like the person you want to be. If this sounds like dealing with the surface, that’s because it is. How you look is not by a long shot who you are. But dressing the part can be the first phase in convincing yourself that it’s really yours.

If in the imagination exercise you envisioned yourself in a designer suit, get one, even if it means going to a consignment shop or finding something out of season that’s been marked down four times. Or maybe you plan on leaving the corporate grind to become a painter. Rehearse your future by dressing down all weekend and bringing out your paints and brushes.

Say your lines. The rest of the world believes what we tell it with our words, our actions and our convictions. We like to think that other people’s opinions don’t matter but that’s only partially true. Other people’s opinions make up our reputation. It’s easier to live up to one we want than live down one we don’t want.

Therefore, include your dream when you identify yourself. Tell people whatever aspects of your life you choose to reveal, but give star billing to the parts you’re passionate about.

Become your character. After dressing and talking as if your dream were already here, live the lifestyle you aspire to as fully as you can within the parameters of your current reality. That way, when you’re actually living the charmed life you envision, you won’t be out of place. If, for instance, you want to have more money, subscribe to the Wall Street Journal and join and investment club. If you want to be a poet, go to readings. Hang out in bookstore coffee bars. Name your puppy Ginsberg.

Learn from the leads. Once you’re looking, sounding and seeming like someone whose dreams are taking shape, see your dreams in the flesh by getting to know people who are successfully doing what you want to do. Join the organizations they belong to. Sign up for the classes they teach and the conferences where they speak. Find out what they did to get where they are and apply those techniques that strike a chord with you.

Rehearse your dream – in costume, with lines, and as your character. Learn all you can from more experienced actors. Now, go break a leg!

I hope you enjoy this last summer weekend and drink in every drop! I’ll see you here next week with a very important topic all my own!

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If you have missed any of this year’s series of F.R.E.E. monthly Create Prosperity Now Tele-classes, all the audios are still available for download to listen to at your convenience. These 60-minute live classes, which teach you exactly how to put the Law of Attraction into ACTION in your life, are held the last Wednesday of each month at 6pm Pacific. I hope you’ll join us on September 30 to learn “The Secret to Happiness.”Please email me at caroll@practicalprosperitycoach.com to receive future call invitations and replay links.